WAR 03-16-2024-to-03-22-2024__THEWINDSofWAR

Housecarl · Mar 16, 2024

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From Khrushchev to Putin, Russian’s Reflexive Control theory has alarmed NATO

The Russian President’s repeated threats of using a tactical nuke in the Ukraine war have achieved their objectives to an extent by dissuading NATO from a direct confrontation

www.firstpost.com

From Khrushchev to Putin, Russian’s Reflexive Control theory has alarmed NATO

Aninda Dey • March 16, 2024, 10:48:21 IST

The Russian President’s repeated threats of using a tactical nuke in the Ukraine war have achieved their objectives to an extent by dissuading NATO from a direct confrontation

“If there is no intention to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope; let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.”

— Nikita Khrushchev, 26 October, 1962

The Soviet premier’s chilling message to American President John F Kennedy during the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the precipice of a nuclear Armageddon.

However, the crisis was averted after an exchange of messages between the two leaders. Khrushchev eventually removed the R-12 MRBMs and R-14 IRBMs with thermonuclear warheads from Cuba and stopped the construction of their launch sites, but his military and diplomatic manoeuvres hit the bullseye. Kennedy promised never to invade Cuba and withdrew the PGM-19 Jupiter nuclear MRBMs from Turkey.

More than six decades later, Moscow again raised the possibility of a nuclear spectre several times, triggering fears of an “Armageddon” in Washington.

Vladimir Putin has threatened the use of tactical nukes during the Ukraine War five times and followed it up with some actions alarming NATO.

On 24 February, 2022, the day he launched his “Special Military Operation”, the Russian president said , “Any further expansion of the North Atlantic alliance’s infrastructure or the ongoing efforts to gain a military foothold of the Ukrainian territory is unacceptable for us.” Russia “has a certain advantage in several cutting-edge weapons. In this context, there should be no doubt for anyone that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country”.

On 21 September, he repeated his N-threat . “In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.”

On 30 September, Putin indirectly hinted at the use of nukes to protect Ukraine’s illegally annexed regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia “with all the forces and means at our disposal”.

In February 2024, when French President Emmanuel Macron didn’t rule out the deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine, Putin said , “Everything that the West comes up with creates the real threat of a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons, and thus the destruction of civilisation.”

This month, Putin said that if American troops are deployed in Russian territory or Ukraine, Russia would treat the move as an intervention. “From a military-technical point of view, we are, of course, ready [for a nuclear war],” he said .

In some cases, Putin’s actions indicated that he might resort to a tactical nuclear attack. On 27 February, 2022, he put the Russian Army’s deterrence forces on high combat alert as top NATO officials were “indulging in aggressive statements directed” at Russia. On 25 March, 2023, Putin announced plans to deploy Russian tactical nukes in Belarus . In March 2024, Russia tested the nuclear-tipped RS-24 Yars ICBM, which travels at Mach 14 and has a multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle.

One month after Putin’s September 2022 threat, US President Joe Biden reacted on expected lines. “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he said .

CNN’s chief national security analyst and anchor Jim Sciutto’s book The Return of Great Powers, released this month, claims that an “analysis and highly sensitive new intelligence” showed that Russia wanted to use a tactical nuke against Ukraine in 2022.

Sciutto claims that a senior US administration official told him that the fear wasn’t “just hypothetical” but “based on some information that we picked up”. Subsequently, the US started “preparing rigorously” for such an eventuality.

These nuclear threats and actions raise some questions.

What is Russia’s nuclear doctrine?

The ‘Decree of the President of the Russian Federation, on 2 June, 2020, provides the framework for the use of nukes in in various scenarios.

a) potential enemy’s build-up in the territories adjacent to the Russian Federation and its allies and in adjacent sea areas of general-purpose force groups, which include nuclear weapons delivery vehicles;
b) deployment by states that consider the Russian Federation as a potential enemy of missile defence systems and means, medium- and shorter-range cruise and ballistic missiles, high-precision non-nuclear and hypersonic weapons, attack unmanned aerial vehicles and directed energy weapons;
c) creation and deployment in space of missile defence and strike systems;
d) states have nuclear weapons and (or) other types of weapons of mass destruction that can be used against the Russian Federation and (or) its allies as well as means of delivery of these types of weapons;
e) uncontrolled proliferation of nuclear weapons, their delivery vehicles and technologies and equipment for their production;
f) placement on the territories of non-nuclear states of nuclear weapons and means of their delivery.

However, Russia can use nuclear weapons against the adversary in a conventional war if its existence is at risk or to prevent the escalation of hostilities and their cessation on terms acceptable to it and the enemy’s deployment of other weapons of mass destruction along its borders.

Were N-threats against Ukraine or NATO?

Putin’s warnings were against NATO, not Ukraine. In every statement, he pointed to the bloc’s eastward expansion, which was allegedly endangering Russia’s existence.

Two months after the Ukraine war, Russia’s Security Council deputy chairman Dmitry Medvedev warned NATO of deploying the nuclear-capable 9K720 Iskander SRBMs in the Russian Kaliningrad exclave—sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania—if Finland and Sweden joined the bloc. Despite his warning, Finland and Sweden joined NATO as Iskanders had been deployed there for years.

When NATO launched ‘ Steadfast Defender 24 ’, its biggest military exercise in Europe since the end of the Cold War, on 24 January, Moscow warned that “any events of this scale significantly increase the risk of military incidents”.

Several incidents prove that Russia never intended to use a tactical nuke against Ukraine despite attacks inside its borders.

Kyiv has targeted the Kerch Bridge, the shortest land route to Crimea used by Russia’s military to transport large equipment and soldiers to Ukraine, several times since October 2022. Now, it has pledged to destroy the bridge. Ukraine also attacked Crimea’s Saky airbase with a missile on 9 August, 2022.

Anti-Moscow groups supporting Kyiv have attacked Russia’s Belgorod region several times since 2023 with the latest on 12 March.

According to Russian media, more than 190 drone attacks have been launched inside Russia, including Moscow, since January 2023. On 12 March this year, Ukraine launched more than 24 drone strikes on energy sites and a major oil refinery in Russia.

Besides, Ukraine has destroyed 21 warships and one submarine of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, according to the Dutch open-source website Oryx, which contains verified tallies of Russian and Ukrainian equipment losses.

The withdrawal from Kyiv and Kherson, the massive losses of troops and equipment and the Ukrainian strikes inside Russian territory were a big trigger for Putin to launch a nuke against Ukraine.

“Our assessment had been for some time that one of the scenarios in which they would contemplate using nuclear weapons [included] things like existential threats to the Russian state and direct threats to Russian territory,” one of the officials told Sciutto.

But Putin didn’t launch a nuke against Ukraine.

Was there any specific intel?

The two senior US officials were ambiguous regarding specific intel about Russia’s intention to use a tactical nuke yet America feared such an attack.

It’s contradictory. “At no point did we ever see any indications of types of steps that we would’ve expected them to take if they were going down a path towards using nuclear weapons,” one of the officials said.

All the US intel community gathered was from its other Western counterparts, who claimed to have received information that “lower levels of the Russian system were discussing” a nuclear strike. “It’s never a cut-and-dry black-and-white assessment,” one of the officials told Sciutto. “But the risk level seemed to be going up—beyond where it had been at any other point in time.”

Since tactical nukes are small compared to strategic nuclear weapons, they can be moved secretly and quietly. “If what they were going to do is use a tactical nuclear weapon … it was not hundred per cent clear to us that we necessarily would have known,” this senior administration official continued.

In either case, the US didn’t have specific intelligence. In fact, the White House denied any imminent threat of a Russian nuke attack after Biden’s “Armageddon” comments in October 2022. Even National Intelligence director Avril Haines said in May 2023 that Russia was “ very unlikely ” to use nukes.

Why Putin issued N-threats and what’s their aim?

Such threats are part of the Soviet-era ‘Theory of Reflexive Control’. The theory combines psychological and information manipulation, pressure tactics and geopolitical strategy to influence the enemy’s decision(s) in Russia’s favour. It’s an asymmetric warfare that changes the adversary’s perception of the situation and forces it to act accordingly to further Russian objectives.

According to Sergey Komov, a leading Russian thinker on information warfare, Reflexive Control can include one or more or a combination of the following tactics : distraction, overload, paralysis, exhaustion, deception, division, pacification, deterrence, provocation, suggestion and pressure.

Reflexive Control is “a means of conveying to a partner or an opponent specially prepared information to incline him to voluntarily make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action”, says Timothy Thomas, a leading American expert Russia’s information warfare.

Basically, Russia escalates the situation to force the adversary to de-escalate. In the process, Russia portrays itself as an irresponsible nuclear power—a bold yet restrained strategy—which either forces the enemy to change its course of action or end the conflict.

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , “Escalation is a deliberate action taken primarily for the purpose of ending a conflict without any further increase in the intensity or level of fighting.”

Though the ‘escalate to de-escalate’ theory is contested by some military experts in the US and Europe, the US 2018 Nuclear Posture Review expressed concern about a scenario where Russia grabs the territory of a NATO member. Subsequently, America and NATO are presented “with a fait accompli” by Russia threatening to use nuclear weapons, according to the Congressional Research Service report in April 2022.

While Russia never uses a nuke, the show of nuclear force, capabilities and readiness are enough to alarm its adversary. The steps usually include putting the nuclear forces on high combat alert, military exercises and testing nuclear-capable missiles.

When Putin put his nuclear forces on high combat alert on February 27, 2022, the US and NATO reacted accordingly.

The US postponed the test launch of the Minuteman III ICBM in March that year. Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said, “In an effort to demonstrate that we have no intention of engaging in any actions that can be misunderstood or misconstrued, the secretary of defence has directed that our Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile test launch scheduled for this week to be postponed.”

Then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, “At no point has Russia been under threat from NATO [or] has Russia been under threat from Ukraine.”

NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said, “This is dangerous rhetoric. This is a behaviour which is irresponsible.”

On 19 February, a few days before the invasion, Russia conducted a massive simulated exercise of its nuclear triad—ICBMs, SLBMs and strategic bombers. The Zircon and Kinzhal cruise missiles, Yars ICBM, and Sineva and Kalibr SLBMs were fired and Tu-95 bombers, warplanes and submarines participated in the exercise.

“The main purpose of the exercise is to train the strategic offensive forces’ actions aimed at delivering a guaranteed defeat of the enemy,” Russia’s Chief of General Staff General Valery Gerasimov.

Russia can show its nuclear prowess by launching a nuke in an unpopulated area, against a populated centre inside Ukraine or against Ukrainian troops.

In the worst-case scenario, Russia could resort to the third option. However, one tactical nuke won’t obliterate the whole Ukrainian military; Russia would need to launch several such weapons. Besides, Russian soldiers would be exposed to radiation.

Putin also knows the risks involved in a nuclear retaliation. Such a drastic step would further isolate him globally and cement the anti-Russian coalition.

Putin’s nuclear threats haven’t wholly achieved their goals. NATO continues to supply missiles, 155mm artillery rounds, tanks and anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. NATO has also okayed the supply of F-16s and Ukrainian pilots are being trained in Romania.

However, Russia’s Reflexive Control has worked to an extent. NATO never deployed its troops in Ukraine to avoid a direct confrontation with Russia. If Ukraine were a NATO member, Article 5 would have come into effect, putting the bloc in direct confrontation with Russia—that’s why the US has avoided allowing Ukraine into the bloc.

America supplied the Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) to Ukraine last year on the assurance that they would not be used to strike inside Russia. Though the Biden administration is contemplating sending long-range ATACMS with a maximum range of 300 km if the House of Representatives approves the $95 military aid package, the missiles will be used to hit targets in Crimea, not inside Russia.

Recently, Stoltenberg said that Ukraine has the right to strike “Russian military targets outside Ukraine. That is international law and, of course, Ukraine has the right to do so to protect itself.”

However, Ukraine has used missiles to strike targets on its occupied territories, like Donetsk, Luhansk or Crimea, not deep inside Russia. Czech Repulic-supplied multiple rocket launcher RM-70 Vampire has been used to target the Russian border city of Belgorod.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Russia neither fired the thermonuclear missiles nor completed the construction of their launch sites. Khrushchev’s diplomacy, misinformation, strategic ambiguity, and psychological pressure against Kennedy worked, and the US reaction was on expected lines.

Similarly, Putin hasn’t used tactical nukes against NATO despite stoking fears of a nuclear retaliation and has achieved his objectives to an extent.

The writer is a freelance journalist with two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

Housecarl · Mar 16, 2024

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[News analysis] Putin may be claiming N. Korea has its “own nuclear umbrella” to gain leverage in relations with S. Korea

Russian President Vladmir Putin stated in an interview Wednesday that North Korea “has its own nuclear umbrella”

english.hani.co.kr

[News analysis] Putin may be claiming N. Korea has its “own nuclear umbrella” to gain leverage in relations with S. Korea

Posted on : 2024-03-15 16:11 KST Modified on : 2024-03-15 16:11 KST

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Russian President Vladmir Putin stated in an interview Wednesday that North Korea “has its own nuclear umbrella”

Russian President Vladmir Putin stated in an interview Wednesday that North Korea “has its own nuclear umbrella.”

This could mean that Russia is planning on ignoring the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, also known as the NPT, and acknowledge North Korea as a nuclear-armed state. If South Korea-Russia relationships continue to deteriorate, Putin may take steps to formalize this acknowledgement.

Reuters reported Wednesday that Putin, in an interview with Russia’s RIA state news agency and Rossiya-1 state television, stated, “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has its own nuclear umbrella.”

An expert on North Korea’s nuclear weapons and non-proliferation stated, “Putin’s taking a step forward to recognize North Korea as a nuclear-armed state with those comments, which will shake up South Korea.” The expert went on to express concern by saying, “It is possible that Putin will visit North Korea this year to formally acknowledge North Korea as a nuclear-armed state and take measures to officially cooperate with North Korea on nuclear issues.”

While North Korea is technologically advanced enough to have nuclear weapons, being acknowledged internationally as a nuclear-armed state is a different problem. Under the NPT, only five countries—the US, Russia, the UK, France, China—are recognized as nuclear powers, with political reasons leading to the acknowledgement of India, Pakistan, and Israel as nuclear-armed states.

Following in Pakistan’s footsteps?
India, Pakistan, and Israel were acknowledged as nuclear-armed states after going against the NPT to develop nuclear weapons, and North Korea is trying to follow in their footsteps.

According to a report reviewing North Korea’s pursuit of being recognized as a nuclear-armed states by Kim Sung-bae, senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Strategy, India and Pakistan secured their status as nuclear countries by conducting nuclear tests first and then negotiating with the US to obtain reliefs from sanctions and cooperation.

Israel secured its status politically through deals with the US and successfully evaded sanctions. While North Korea tried, for an extended period, to gain its status as a nuclear-armed state by negotiating with the US, the collapse of the 2018 Hanoi summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un led to the failure of such plans.

However, if Trump steps back into the White House, North Korea could still try to pursue a deal with Washington that recognizes Pyongyang’s nuclear program and eases sanctions.

North Korea is currently seeking political approval from its de facto guardian states, Russia and China, to defy international sanctions and become an internationally recognized nuclear weapon state. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Putin are strengthening strategic ties after vowing to “continue to strengthen […] bilateral ties on all fronts.”

Putin, who is expected to win the 2024 Russian presidential election, held on March 15-17, may visit North Korea after his inauguration in May and make a strategic declaration to recognize North Korea as a nuclear power.

If Putin declares a resumption of nuclear cooperation with North Korea and offers to provide support for Pyongyang’s nuclear technology, he will be formally recognizing North Korea’s status as a nuclear weapon state.

It is also expected that North Korea will intensify its armed demonstrations to push negotiations toward disarmament talks instead of denuclearization.

Pyongyang likely to continue provocations
Senior research fellow Kim Sung-bae stated, “North Korea is engaging in belligerent rhetoric that identifies South Korea as its principal enemy and as a target for nuclear attacks in order to induce arms control negotiations by threatening to place the Korean Peninsula on the brink of nuclear war.”

“North Korea will escalate tensions intentionally by carrying out regional-level provocations in order to make the possibility of war on the Korean Peninsula seem more plausible,” he added.

Souring South Korea-Russia relations is also creating more opportunities for North Korea. Russia’s detainment of a South Korean national on charges of espionage has plunged Seoul-Moscow relations into muddier waters.

There is a dire need for strategic diplomacy to manage South Korea-Russia relations to avoid any situation that may put the national security of South Korea in further danger.

By Park Min-hee, editorial writer
Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]

Macron to Putin: "It is inappropriate to threaten when we have nuclear weapons"

French President Emmanuel Macron responded to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s "nuclear" threats.

According to Censor.NET with reference to Le Figaro, Macron said in an interview with TF1 and France 2 that it was "inappropriate to threaten" the French when they have nuclear weapons.

"It is inappropriate to threaten when we have nuclear weapons," the French leader said.

He added that he had not spoken to the Kremlin leader for several months and that such a dialogue took place "when it was necessary",

"Putin is a prisoner of repression and authoritarianism in his country, which in recent years has decided to become a destabilizing state," Macron said.

Read also on Censor.NET: There are no prerequisites for Russia to use nuclear weapons, - IAEA Head Grossi

Macron also emphasized that nuclear powers should "first and foremost feel secure" because they have such weapons.

"When it comes to nuclear weapons, few words are needed. This imposes a responsibility on us to prevent escalation," he concluded.

As a reminder, on 29 February, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin said that Russia's strategic nuclear forces were in a state of full readiness for guaranteed use. He also spoke about the development of new weapons used in the war against Ukraine, including the Peresvit laser system. Source: https://censor.net/en/n3478794

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Housecarl · Mar 16, 2024

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Germany debates nuclear weapons, again. But now it’s different.

Germany relies on extended US nuclear deterrence for its security. Now, the prospect of Trump's re-election could change this strategy.

thebulletin.org

Germany debates nuclear weapons, again. But now it’s different.

By Ulrich Kühn | March 15, 2024

Germans are debating nuclear deterrence—again. They did so when US President Donald Trump won the White House in 2016; when he almost wrecked a NATO Summit in 2018; when French President Emmanuel Macron offered Europeans a strategic nuclear dialogue in 2020; and when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Now that Trump, poised to be the Republican candidate to this year’s presidential election, has casually threatened not to come to the defense of NATO allies should one of them be attacked, Germans cannot help but looking for deterrence alternatives again—including nuclear weapons.

But why would one worry since these musings come and go without any noticeable consequences? Well, there are consequences, and a perfect storm is now brewing in Berlin, one that might ultimately blow away the last remains of Germany’s once deeply ingrained identity of a “civilian power.”

What are Germans debating exactly? As I argue in a new book I edited, Germany is both security dependent and politically conservative. The country depends on the United States and a somewhat benevolent security environment to balance its competing interests in deterrence and disarmament. Its political conservatism leads German decision-makers to preserve as many as possible of these interests, even if external conditions change significantly. The combination of dependency and conservatism can ultimately result in inertia, tying German leaders’ hands and making the country appear indecisive and anxious.

Today, fear is palpable as Germans are debating a question that sounds like it was taken right from the early Cold War playbooks: What if the United States abandons Europe in face of a Russian aggression? In this debate, Germans quickly come up with answers: (1) a somewhat Europeanized deterrent, based on French and British nuclear forces, (2) Germany co-financing the French force de frappe in exchange for greater security assurances from Paris, or (3) a German bomb.

In all this, Germans still do not bother to discuss plausible proliferation strategies, including their costs and risks. Instead, hilarious proposals are making the rounds in Germany’s most-read newspapers. One such proposal suggests a “Eurobomb,” with the nuclear command-and-control suitcase constantly “roaming” between EU capitals. Another recommends that Europeans immediately buy 1,000 “nonactive” US strategic warheads and missiles in conjunction with Germany revoking its membership in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, also known as the ban treaty. (Germany never signed the treaty.)

What is perhaps most striking is that no one in Germany dares to ask whether any of these proposals would ultimately make Germany—and Europe—any safer. As Barbara Kunz, an expert on French security policy, and I wrote: “[T]he thinking [in Berlin] seems to be based on a relatively simplistic approach where nuclear weapons equal deterrence, which equals more security. Accordingly, possessing the bomb serves as some sort of life insurance, simply by the fact that the bomb is there. The fact that the reality of nuclear deterrence is obviously more complex … plays no role in the German debate.”

RELATED:
Putin’s “bluff”: a cautionary note about underestimating the possibility of nuclear escalation in Ukraine

What’s different this time? The latest iteration of the German nuclear debate nevertheless shows some key differences from previous ones. First, it takes place in a European security environment that has moved much closer to the scenario of US abandonment and Russian aggression than most assumed back in 2016, when Trump rattled Europeans for the first time. As a consequence, proliferation chatter is not an exclusively German specialty anymore. Most notably Polish leaders, including President Andrzej Duda and new Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, have publicly mused about nuclear weapons other than the United States’.

Second, while the early German nuclear debates featured mostly pundits, journalists, and some political backbenchers, those who now favorably discuss deterrence alternatives increasingly include current and former heavyweights from across the political spectrum. They include Friedrich Merz, Wolfgang Schäuble, and Manfred Weber from the Conservatives, Sigmar Gabriel and Katarina Barley from the Social Democrats, and Joschka Fischer and Sergey Logodinsky from the Greens. When Germany’s Finance Minister Christian Lindner from the Free Democrats joined the chorus in mid-February, Chancellor Olaf Scholz finally had to put his foot down: He reminded his fellow coalition partner that “Germany decided a long time ago not to seek its own nuclear weapons.”

Third, nuclear disarmament—a central pillar of post-Cold War German foreign and security policy—does not play a role in the German public discourse any more. When in March 2022 Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s Foreign Minister from the Greens, urged Germans in response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine to “understand disarmament and arms control as being complementary to deterrence and defense,” everyone in Berlin got the point. A recent comparative analysis of Bundestag statements found that the word “disarmament” barely showed up in parliamentary debates in 2022—a stark difference with previous years. Prior iterations of the German nuclear debate had seen multiple expert interventions in favor of disarmament and arms control policies. But these voices have mostly gone silent now.

RELATED:
Nuclear weapons sharing, 2023

Fourth, a newfound hawkishness has come to dominate the German media discourse. Fueled by a few dozen hardline think tankers and politicians, restraint—in every form, including the obvious limitations of a mutual deterrence relationship with Russia—is considered weak and a sign of fear of Russia. “Self-deterrence” is the main charge levelled against Scholz to dismiss every consideration of potential escalation pathways vis-à-vis Russia.

All this happens on the back of a shift in public opinion. Latest surveys show that Germans see nuclear weapons much less negatively than in the past. In a poll conducted by German pollster Infratest-dimap in mid 2022, for the first time in decades a majority of respondents said they welcomed US nuclear weapons deployed on German soil. When the German nuclear debate kicked off in 2016, nuclear skeptics could still claim that the entire discussion was out of touch with Germans’ long-standing preference for nuclear abolition. Today, that is no longer a clear-cut case.

What’s next? So far in the debate, the shifting parameters have not gone so far as to lead the government to pursue any visible changes to Germany’s deterrence arrangements. No less important, 90 percent of Germans reject the notion that the country should have its own nuclear weapons. The combination of Germany’s security dependence and political conservatism, however, might lead to difficult choices ahead.

A reelection of Trump and subsequent policy changes in US nuclear guarantees to European allies could lay bare the obvious downsides of German dependency. At the same time, German conservatism could force the country to search for deterrence alternatives in such a scenario.

For nearly 70 years, Germany has relied on extended US nuclear deterrence for its security, with successive German governments—including Conservatives, Social Democrats, Free Democrats, and Greens—showing their continued support. Suggesting that Germany would break with that tradition and get rid of nuclear deterrence altogether should Trump withdraw US nuclear weapons from Europe seems hardly realistic. Rather, Germany would more likely probe Paris and London for increased nuclear commitments to Europe’s security.

But should this probing fail—and current rifts between the countries over arms deliveries to Ukraine and military secrecy are not a good omen—Berlin may indeed face the toughest of all decisions about ensuring its own security. Over the years, the recurring German debate about nuclear weapons has pushed the boundaries of what is conceivable in German politics consistently closer to the atom.

Housecarl · Mar 18, 2024

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Agni-5 is a counter to China’s nuclear expansion, but India can’t stop at MIRVing

MIRVing permits a single missile to carry several warheads that can be aimed at multiple targets several hundred kilometres apart. It comes with pros and cons.

theprint.in

Opinion

Agni-5 is a counter to China’s nuclear expansion, but India can’t stop at MIRVing

MIRVing permits a single missile to carry several warheads that can be aimed at multiple targets several hundred kilometres apart. It comes with pros and cons.

RAJESH RAJAGOPALAN
18 March, 2024 08:00 am IST

Indian nuclear development has been steady but very slow. The recent test launch of the MIRV-capable Agni-5 Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile marked an important milestone. While Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicle, or MIRV, technology is not an absolute necessity, it does give India additional options, especially in the face of China’s rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal. But it also raises some concerns.

MIRVing permits a single missile to carry several warheads that can be aimed at multiple targets several hundred kilometres apart. Another advantage is that it enables carrying additional decoy warheads that can help defeat ballistic missile defences (BMDs). This is not an immediate concern because none of the currently operational BMDs can effectively counter ICBM-range missiles. Although the US has deployed its Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, its effectiveness against anything more than one or two ICBMs at a time is questionable. Of course, no country is likely to fire just a couple of ICBMs at a time, making its utility suspect. But MIRVing is at least a hedge for the future, should such BMD technologies become available.

Also Read: Agni 5 a technological feat for India. But is it also a sign of a dangerous nuclear arms race?

Pros and cons of MIRVing

Currently, there is greater utility in adapting MIRV technology to shorter range missiles, such as IRBMs (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles). MIRVing can help IRBMs defeat missile defence systems that are designed to counter them, such as China’s S-400s.

Pakistan, for example, has claimed it is developing the Ababeel missile, an IRBM with MIRVed warheads, because of India’s efforts to acquire a BMD system. Ababeel was test fired last October, although it is unclear if it has been deployed. However, the effectiveness of this strategy is questionable. Even though Pakistan’s longest-range missiles are IRBMs, and thus potentially vulnerable to Indian BMD systems, MIRVing them makes no sense. Any Indian BMD is only going to be a point defence system, protecting only the national capital region or a specific target, leaving the rest of the country open to attack. It is typical overkill by Pakistan’s military, though it may be more propaganda than a working system.

MIRVing becomes even more relevant if IRBMs have both nuclear and conventional options since the latter are much more likely to be employed. Several IRBMs are thought to have both nuclear and conventional warhead types, including China’s DF-26 and North Korea’s Hwasong-10, although this has not been officially confirmed by the respective countries.

First, should IRBMs be wasted by putting relatively light conventional warheads on them? IRBMs have a potential range advantage because they can attack targets beyond the reach of India’s current combat aircraft, including the Su-30MKI, its heaviest and longest-range combat jet.

But there are at least two disadvantages. One is that putting conventional warheads on IRBMs assumes extremely high accuracy for such missiles. Conventional warheads on ballistic missiles do not pack much of a punch in explosive power, especially if they carry multiple warheads. This means that unless they have pinpoint accuracy, they will not be effective. Even with high accuracy, they are unlikely to be effective against underground or hardened targets. In essence, then, conventional warheads on IRBMs are not a very useful option, especially if they are MIRVed.

The second issue is that using such weapons creates what is known as the “discrimination problem”. This refers to the difficulty defenders face in determining whether the incoming missile is armed with a nuclear or conventional warhead. If the same missile can be armed with both types of warheads, the defender might assume it is a nuclear attack. They may then respond with a nuclear retaliation without waiting to verify the warhead type. Due to the risk of inadvertent nuclear escalation, it is a good practice to not arm the same missile type with both nuclear and conventional warheads. However, this principle is increasingly under challenge as more long-range missiles are armed with conventional warheads.

MIRVing missiles such as Agni-5 is unlikely to cause such confusions because no one, including India, is likely to use ICBMs with a conventional warhead. But there are other issues to consider.

Housecarl · Mar 19, 2024

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US racing to deploy sub-launched hypersonic missiles - Asia Times

The US plans to construct an underwater hypersonic weapons testing facility, paving the way for its submarine-launched hypersonic weapons against

asiatimes.com

WEAPONRY

US racing to deploy sub-launched hypersonic missiles

New underwater testing facility a key step but the plan still hobbled by budget cuts, reduced shipbuilding orders and unclear mission objectives

By GABRIEL HONRADA MARCH 19, 2024

The US plans to construct an underwater hypersonic weapons testing facility, paving the way for its submarine-launched hypersonic weapons against potential adversaries China and Russia.

At a hearing of the US Senate Committee on Armed Services this month, Vice Admiral Johnny Wolfe, the US Navy’s director of Strategic Systems Programs, said that the US is establishing the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonics Test Bed (MACH-TB) and an innovative Underwater Test Facility at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Indiana.

The underwater facility, in particular, marks a significant step toward deploying hypersonic capabilities from submarines, indicating a move to enhance the stealth and survivability of these critical systems.

Wolfe also announced a collaborative effort between the Navy and Army to develop and field a common hypersonic weapon system. The partnership will leverage a shared hypersonic glide body and missile booster and will be on a robust joint test schedule to ensure the cutting-edge weapons meet rigorous performance and reliability standards.

Wolfe emphasized the critical attributes of hypersonic systems, which can travel over five times the speed of sound and rapidly and effectively target heavily defended high-value assets due to their speed, maneuverability and altitude.

The weapons are central to the US Department of Defense’s (DOD) strategic vision as outlined in the 2022 National Defense Strategy, which aims to bolster integrated deterrence, enhance campaigning capabilities and secure enduring advantages over potential adversaries.

The US previously announced its intent to deploy hypersonic weapons aboard submarines, although budget cuts and the lack of appropriate testing facilities have hamstrung the effort.

In November 2021, USNI News reported that the US Navy aims to deploy the Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) hypersonic weapon system aboard the first Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine (SSN) equipped with the Virginia Payload Module by 2028.

It originally intended to field hypersonics on the four guided-missile variants of the Ohio-class submarines in 2025 but had to change its plans due to budget cuts that prevented it from constructing an underwater test facility.

In terms of missile capacity, USNI noted in February 2020 that the add-on Virginia Payload Module has 28 additional missile tubes for 40 missiles per submarine. The report notes that the module would make the Virginia-class SSNs a viable replacement for the older Ohio-class SSGNs armed with 154 missiles, albeit with less missile capacity, potentially leading to magazine depth and firepower concerns.

Budget cuts and reduced shipbuilding orders may greatly shadow the future of the US’ planned submarine-based hypersonic arsenal. Breaking Defense reported that the US Navy reduced its 2025 order for Virginia-class SSNs from two to just one unit this month.

Breaking Defense says that despite canceling one of the planned Virginia SSNs, the US Navy’s 2025 budget maintains the nine projected submarines and US submarine production capability for the US Navy and AUKUS.

While constructing an underwater hypersonic weapons testing facility advances the US hypersonic weapons program, a February 2024 US Congressional Research Service (CRS) report asks critical questions about hypersonic weapons’ operational and strategic implications.

The CRS report says that while US hypersonic weapons research is heavily funded, it lacks clear acquisition plans or approved mission requirements. It also says there are divergent views on the scale and affordability of producing the weapons in meaningful battlefield numbers.

The CRS report says that more detailed assessments including on cost and strategic analyses are needed to better understand the role of hypersonic weapons in US strategy.

On the possible US tactical and strategic uses of hypersonic weapons, Alan Cummings notes in a November 2019 War on the Rocks article that the US can use the weapons to signal interest and resolve, leverage to pursue arms control agreements and provide a flexible response in light of adversary counter-space operations.

Cummings notes that the likely low number of US hypersonic weapons makes them potent signals towards adversaries, as they can show US priorities on interests and redlines. He also notes that low-visibility deployments and systems that can be quickly surged and recovered may be beneficial to achieve that objective.

In 2010, the US simultaneously surfaced three Ohio-class SSGNs in the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans. This move may have shown the US’s displeasure with China’s activities in the South China Sea and East China Sea. The submarines involved were the USS Michigan at Pusan, South Korea, the USS Ohio at Subic Bay, Philippines and the USS Florida at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Cummings says hypersonic weapons can mitigate the threats near-peer adversaries China and Russia pose to trade or other strategic interests if used as bargaining chips in future arms control agreements.

He notes that for the US to negotiate from a position of strength, it needs to develop the same capabilities it aims to limit, as only then would potential adversaries take negotiations seriously.

However, the US may already be seriously behind in submarine-launched hypersonic missiles. In February 2024, Asia Times reported on Russia’s first use of its Zircon ship and submarine-launched hypersonic weapon in the ongoing Ukraine war.

Russia’s Zircon missile underwent its first flight test in 2015 and was announced operational in 2022. The missile was tested by two warships, namely the Admiral Gorshkov frigate and the Severodvinsk SSGN, before being deployed to the frigate in January 2023.

Those naval vessels are not present in the Black Sea at the moment. If the missile were to be launched in combat, it would be atypical to be fired from a ship on which it has yet to be tested.

Cummings also mentions that using hypersonic weapons could offer alternative ways to react to adversaries’ hostile actions in space. He says that the US relies heavily on space-based assets for communication, surveillance and navigation, making it particularly concerned about adversary threats to those assets.

He states that hypersonic weapons can give the US first-strike capabilities against the command uplinks to anti-satellite weapons before the latter could be used.

He also mentions that the short flight time of hypersonic weapons could allow the US to inflict damage before its space-based assets are lost. Both, according to Cummings, are plausible responses to anti-space attacks that can deter the use of anti-satellite weapons in the first place.

What tactics are being used?

The report found that various tactics are being used by North Korean state actors to access digital currency and sensitive information.

In one instance, the Lazarus Group — an actor linked to North Korea's primary intelligence network the Reconnaissance General Bureau — manipulated job seekers online "into opening malicious apps for fake job interviews" that then allowed them backdoor access to company systems.

The report noted that aerospace companies in Spain, the Netherlands and Poland had been attacked using similar methods.

Citing a Microsoft report, the panel said North Korea had targeted defence companies across the globe, including in Russia, the US, Germany and France.

Cryptoactors were found to have used phishing and social engineering techniques in deliberate campaigns targeting cryptocurrency industry employees.

Groups also breached weak security and attacked third party supply chains to steal cryptocurrency.

The panel found North Korea was becoming increasingly reliant on services in neighbouring countries like China and Russia to launder its stolen cryptocurrency while at the same time, attacking government agencies, companies and individuals in those same countries at a high rate.

The report concluded that five cyberactors linked to North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau -- the Lazarus Group, Andariel, BlueNoroff, ScarCruft and Kimsuky — should be sanctioned.

It recommended individuals and cryptocurrency exchanges take extra steps to ensure security and boost monitoring to identify possible DPRK transactions.

It also found that one of the cyberactors — most likely Kimusky — was probably responsible for targeting the private email address of a member of the panel with a persistent spear-phishing campaign.

The panel found this amounted to "sanctions evasion".

Posted 4h ago

Housecarl · Mar 21, 2024

Note the article source....HC

Posted for fair use......

Has Iran become a de facto nuclear state? | Opinion

***

www.haaretz.com

Haaretz | Opinion
Opinion |

Has Iran Become a De Facto Nuclear State?

Did the events of October 7, and the subsequent war in Gaza, give Tehran a golden opportunity to cross all the relevant thresholds? Keep an eye on the statements by former Iranian official Ali Akbar Salehi

Avner Cohen

Get email notification for articles from Avner CohenFollow
Mar 21, 2024 8:38 pm IST

In a televised interview in Tehran on February 12, Ali Akbar Salehi – maybe the most senior Iranian official to combine knowledge and authority in nuclear physics and diplomacy – declared that "we [Iran] have crossed all the thresholds of nuclear science and technology..."........(rest behind a subscription wall)

Housecarl · Mar 21, 2024

Hummm.........

Posted for fair use.....

Beating Putin’s Game of Nuclear Chicken

The Russian leader regularly threatens to use nuclear weapons to intimidate the US. An effective counter would exploit his fears.

www.justsecurity.org

Beating Putin’s Game of Nuclear Chicken

by Douglas London
March 21, 2024

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent comments that his country was ready for nuclear war if needed, made in the runup to his dubious re-election this past weekend, were just the latest of such threats, direct and indirect, as he tries to redeem his full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago. But U.S. officials and observers risk overestimating his triggers and the readiness with which he might torch his own world, along with ours. That inadvertently accords him the space to press an aggressive agenda, despite his own weaknesses. The key to Putin is not in providing him off-ramps to save face or appealing to his vanity or by applying the West’s own standards of logic. Solving Putin requires accentuating the darkness rather than the light by exploiting his fears.

Russians have endured centuries of terror imposed by both foreign invaders and their own leaders. One need only see a Russian production of “The Nutcracker” or read Dostoyevsky to appreciate a dark outlook shaped by a history of devastating hardships and loss. Putin’s rule leverages that sense of victimization and constant fear of impending doom.

But he is forged by those very same scars. His own sense of paranoia and impending doom drives his choices and is further shaped by conditioning and experiences as a Cold War-era KGB veteran (and I have known my share). That molding accounts for Putin’s heightened sense of moral superiority and expectation of the worst from friend and foe alike. For Putin, no written agreement, much less a verbal deal, is ever permanent, but is rather underwritten by conditions, which are themselves always subject to change. And the ends very much justify the means.

Domestically, Putin worries most about his own army, an organic uprising, or the threat of betrayal by someone close to him. He was trained to distrust the military, against which the KGB dedicated an entire directorate, the Third, to monitor it for counterintelligence and political loyalty. The Russian leader therefore keeps the army on a tight leash and under the Federal Security Service (FSB)’s watchful eyes. But even so, he understands that those with the guns are always a threat. Putin’s indecisiveness and fear showed in his much-delayed reaction when once-loyal henchman Yevgeny Prigozhin moved his Wagner mercenary forces within 125 miles of Moscow, bringing the country to the verge of civil war.

Putin is well aware of his country’s own history of coups orchestrated from within and uprisings inspired by charismatic figures. He also watched in horror as Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi succumbed to a violent crowd that arose from the Arab Spring’s spontaneous outpouring of anger and hopelessness, a rather formative event for the Russian leader, as Kim Ghattas observed two years ago in The Atlantic. “One can trace a straight line from the overthrow of Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi to today’s devastating war in Ukraine,” she wrote.

Attempts to Insulate Himself from Threats
Perhaps in his desperation to ensure nothing similar happens to him, Putin repeatedly engages in the hardly concealed elimination of political challengers such as Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemstov, revenge killings as in the case of Prigozhin and the poisoning in the U.K. of FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko, and the 2016 creation of the politically loyal 200,000-400,000-strong Rosgvardia, a national guard that reports directly to him. And his isolation, micromanagement, and lack of delegation in a deliberately stovepiped bureaucracy aims to offset an insider threat.

Putin’s fears are reflected in the very way he rules. He manages Russia like the leader of a criminal syndicate, through the FSB and a small, tight circle of officers in its predecessor, the KGB, who are roughly the same age and share similar careers, life experiences, and ties to his hometown of St. Petersburg. The group, along with their children, have assumed Russia’s key government, security, energy sector, and banking positions, from where they oversee the country’s resources, launder their families’ financial gains, and are generationally bound to him.

Externally, his perception of threat is clear, simple, and historic: the West, as currently embodied by American leadership. Just as history offers Putin the experience of Western powers intervening in Russia’s civil war during the Bolshevik Revolution on behalf of the Russian White armies, Putin believes the United States and its allies were behind the ”color revolutions” that, by challenging his acolytes in power, challenged his control of former Soviet republics. Likewise, internally, Putin is convinced that U.S. democracy and development assistance that nurtured Russia’s early democratic structures by supporting civil society and normal political party building actually sought to ignite flames of opposition by supporting forces he worked so hard to contain.

Ironically, Putin has created his own current predicament. Russians have historically been willing to trade a degree of freedom for the stability and protection of a strongman. After restoring Russian pride, reinvigorating the economy, seemingly securing lifetime tenure, and extending Moscow’s influence after 20-plus years of rule, Putin’s gamble on Ukraine threatens to break that social contract and unleash the potential demons he most fears. As such, winning requires nothing less than subordinating Ukraine into a vassal state, fracturing NATO, and weakening American power, largely to shore up his flagging reputation at home.

And it’s that fear that accounts for Putin’s sporadic nuclear threats. Putin roars loudest when bluffing. In reality, he has proceeded with greater caution when holding a weak hand, as some experts suggested as he and his forces struggled early in his post-2022 invasion. Conversely, when he seems to be operating from a position of strength, he appears outwardly reasonable, benign, and conciliatory but actually acts more aggressively. This is reflected by the recent suspected murders of the imprisoned Navalny and of a Russian defector in Spain. French President Emmanuel Macron’s comments concerning the possible deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine clearly unsettled Putin, who had not rattled the nuclear saber for some months, concurrent with Russia’s battlefield progress.

Playing Into His Threats
Despite U.S. fears of triggering Putin into ending the world – or at least deploying a tactical nuke on the battlefield — he is more practical than he is often seen in the West. Putin is not the suicidal type, nor the type to fall on his own sword over abused pride so long as he is still in control. But he will press as far as he is allowed. So it does more harm than good to play into his bombastic threats by writing him off as mad or to temper responses to his acts of aggression rather than leveraging his fears. Delaying or rejecting Ukrainian requests for qualitatively advanced and long-range weapons for its defense only encourages Putin to believe his histrionics work and compels him to double down.

Therein lies the most realistic danger that Putin could be tempted to use tactical nuclear weapons: should his fortunate in Ukraine be reversed, it could become part of his calculus of escalating to deescalate, by leveraging Western fear of total nuclear war. And a threat by advancing Ukrainian forces to liberate Crimea might just test that threshold, allowing Putin to rationalize denying his enemy victory while still believing he would spare territorial Russia from further consequences. All the more reason to be crystal clear to him about the certain and extreme U.S. conventional military response, rather than counter-productively withholding aid to Ukraine.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled Russian oligarch and critic now on the Kremlin’s wanted list, recently remarked similarly to journalists, observing that Putin was not suicidal. It’s not by chance that Russia in 2020 published its revised strategy allowing for a nuclear first use to counter a conventional existential threat. And more recent reports forewarn that Russia has developed plans to use tactical nuclear weapons against the United States and China in the early stages of a war to force an opponent to back down to avoid the prospect of apocalyptic escalation.

It’s essential that Putin not be allowed to normalize the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or the use of such rhetoric in a feat of escalation dominance. I suspect this might have been the message conveyed by CIA Director William Burns to Russian Foreign Intelligence Chief Sergei Naryshkin when they met in Ankara in November 2022. The United States needs to articulate the devastating costs Russia would face — at a minimum, the destruction of Russia’s armed forces in Ukraine and remaining naval assets in the Black Sea, through conventional means. But such words need to be supported with observable military preparations and corollary actions minimally concealed via covert action that raise the heat in Putin’s own backyard. The Ukrainians appear to be doing this with greater intensity themselves, through long-range strikes, sabotage operations, and support to armed Russian opposition groups.

The State of Play
For now, Putin is operating from relative strength, given recent Russian battlefield gains and myriad end runs around the West’s sanctions. That may reduce the prospect of reaching his threshold for turning to tactical nuclear devices. But that doesn’t mean he is winning. Ukraine is battered, but surviving, and NATO is bigger, stronger, and more unified than ever. And he does not have all the time in the world; Russians might have a high pain threshold, as Putin claims, but it’s not inexhaustible. According to a December U.S. intelligence assessment, Russia has lost 315,000 troops, 87 percent of the total ground troops it had before February 2022, with more losses to come as Putin uses human waves of poorly trained conscripts to overwhelm Ukrainian ammunition supplies. Further mobilizations will inevitably extend beyond the rural and Turkic-speaking communities now largely absorbing these losses.

Putin’s battlefield progress and Ukraine’s dwindling supplies also will likely lead Kyiv to continue its increased tempo of bringing the war home to Russians, with strikes and special operations against commercial and infrastructure targets that affect their everyday life and can’t be concealed. Doing so might further shorten Putin’s clock.

Economically, a December 2023 Rand study captures the war’s financial costs and projects Russia’s standard of living to decline throughout the remaining decade. And an Institute for the Study of War assessment found that Russia’s war machine has picked up momentum in concert with its increased industrial capacity and decreased Ukrainian resistance, but current Russian manufacturing capabilities and stored combat systems won’t last forever.

Leveraging Putin’s Fears
The United States can influence Putin’s calculus by leveraging his fears and departing from the strategy of proportionate responses that hands him the reins of escalation management. This is necessary to undermine Putin’s belief that his wielding of the nuclear cudgel is succeeding in disproportionately extending Russian power projection and national prestige beyond its conventional capabilities and that his rhetoric has deterred greater U.S. intervention.

Deterring Putin’s aggression requires tangible, predictable, and disproportionate costs. Examples would include arming Kyiv with the full menu of advanced and long-range weapons and aircraft whose use, unless circumstances require, would be limited to Russian-occupied Ukraine; cyber operations that target Russian energy infrastructure, defense-related industry, and banking; and more robust and creative influence campaigns — public and covert alike — that depict Putin as weak, cowardly, insensitive to casualties, and endangering the Russian ruble, which was at the crux of Russia’s still memorable and painful 1998 financial crisis.

Another tool would be unleashing the CIA to stir up trouble in Russia and its client states like Belarus, as former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Robert Gates said in a recent interview would be useful. The New York Times reported that the CIA has already played a critical role since at least 2016 – and to some degree earlier — in training, assisting, advising, and equipping covert Ukrainian intelligence-collection units and special operations teams. This provides the United States a well-established operational infrastructure of its own creation and trusted relationships with Ukrainian partners, in a program that could be further expanded with operations across Russia. After all, U.S. reticence and public declarations of unwillingness to support Ukrainian attacks beyond Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine have not exempted Washington from Putin’s blame game.

Managing Putin’s threats requires constant and consistent demonstrations of U.S. strength that make clear the disproportionate consequences Washington could levy, and that could reshape his calculus. Measures short of war that target Putin’s natural paranoia and undermine his façade of stability, prosperity, and strength will accentuate his vulnerability. And raising the costs of his stirring the pot abroad will put him on the defensive at home. Such actions will demonstrate that the United States is not willing to be held hostage to nuclear threats.

IMAGE: In this pool photograph distributed by Russia’s state agency Sputnik, Russian President Vladimir Putin gives an interview to TV host and Director General of Rossiya Segodnya (RIA Novosti) news agency Dmitry Kiselyov at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 12, 2024. His comments included that Russia was “ready” to use nuclear weapons if it felt necessary, but “there has never been such a need.” (Photo by GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

About the Author(s)

Douglas London

Douglas London (@douglaslondon5) is the author of "The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence," and teaches intelligence studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for more than 34 years, mostly in the Middle East, South and Central Asia and Africa, including three assignments as a Chief of Station and as the CIA’s Counterterrorism Chief for South and Southwest Asia.
https://www.justsecurity.org/93635/beating-putins-game-of-nuclear-chicken/?share=reddit&nb=1

Housecarl · Mar 21, 2024

Posted for fair use.......

Germany and a European Nuclear Deterrence Capability - The Globalist

German caution and hesitancy are mostly to blame for the lack of progress in developing a European nuclear deterrent. This must change.

www.theglobalist.com

Global Security

Germany and a European Nuclear Deterrence Capability

German caution and hesitancy are mostly to blame for the lack of progress in developing a European nuclear deterrent. This must change.
March 21, 2024

By Dieter Dettke

Germany’s commitment to remain a non-nuclear state has been a blessing for Europe in the past. Never before in its complicated history has Germany been in the beneficial geopolitical position of being “surrounded” by fellow EU and NATO members.

NATO membership without nuclear weapons made it possible to create a unique constellation for European security. To pave the way for unification, Germany re-affirmed its renunciation of the manufacture, possession of and control over nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in the 1991 Two plus Four Treaty.

The NPT Treaty would continue to apply in full to the united Germany. Therefore, Germany remains permanently committed “not to receive the transfer from or whatsoever of nuclear weapons or explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly.”

The new nuclear landscape

Today we are at a point of international tensions, including threats of a possible use of nuclear weapons emanating from Russia, as well as from other states with nuclear weapons such as North Korea, China and, in the future, also from Iran.

Germany will not remain unaffected if any of the states with nuclear weapons became involved in a possible conflict with the United States, a member of NATO or the EU.

Germany’s commitment to stand with Israel as a matter of “Staatsraeson” could also force it to act militarily. Germany needs to reconsider its non-nuclear status now to avoid being blackmailed in future conflict situations.

The German commitment to a non-nuclear status in international law has always been qualified insofar as the country, when ratifying the NPT Treaty and other commitments to remain non-nuclear, always reserved the right of self-defense anchored in Chapter VII, Article 51 of the UN Charter.

The Charter text is crystal clear saying that “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense.”

When signing the NPT Treaty, the German Government expressed the expectation that the Treaty would preclude “any threat or use of force directed against the territorial integrity or the political independence of a State” by a nuclear weapon state.

Most importantly, Germany declared that “it signs the treaty in the expectation that it will not hamper European unification” and “that no provision of the treaty may be interpreted in such a way as to hamper the further development of European unification, especially the creation of a European Union with the appropriate competences.”

The Russia dimension

Russian nuclear threats today violate the NPT Treaty, as well as other commitments to arms control. Russia is threatening the use of nuclear weapons in order to protect its territorial annexations in Ukraine.

Putin dramatized his nuclear escalation in his February 24 State of the Union Address, saying that Western military support for Ukraine, as well as President Macron’s statement not to exclude the deployment of European troops on the ground in Ukraine, “really threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons and the destruction of civilization.” And he added “Strategic Nuclear Forces are in a state of full readiness for guaranteed use.”

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev declared that Russia “would have to use nuclear weapons” if Ukraine’s counteroffensive succeeded in retaking Russian-held territory.

There should be no doubt that Russia’s imperial interest in regaining control over Ukraine even by military means – although the country has given up nuclear weapons – and Europe’s interest in preserving the independence of Ukraine, including its future EU membership, are bound to clash fundamentally in the future.

Vladimir Putin’s world view

In his long article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Vladimir Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians were one people with a common language and the common Orthodox faith.

He went on to demonstrate that Ukraine was never a real separate entity. On the contrary, “We are natural complementary economic partners” and we always had “a sense of unity” and “close cultural, spiritual and economic ties.”

It was the West that managed to turn Ukraine “into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia.” “Aggressive Russophobia” drives Ukraine to implement a “forced change of identity.”

In Putin’s perception, Ukraine is now a fundamental threat for Russia. “The formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.”

According to Putin, today’s Ukraine is an anti-Russian project shaped by Neo-Nazis and the West and “We will never allow our historical territories and people close to us living there to be used against Russia.” And to those who will undertake such an attempt “I would like to say that this way they will destroy their own country.”

Putin’s threats and the perception that a Ukraine not in partnership with Russia would be the equivalent of the use of weapons of mass destruction against Russia must not be taken lightly.

The nuclear balance sheet

The seriousness of the Russian threat becomes evident when considering the Russian nuclear arsenal. In addition to its vast intercontinental nuclear capability, Russia has 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons targeting the continent.

On the Western side in Europe there are some 225 strategic nuclear warheads on submarines in Great Britain, and 290 strategic nuclear warheads in France.

While not negligible, European nuclear capabilities are seriously inferior compared with Russian nuclear weapons targeting Europe.

The neglected need for deterrence

The question for Europe now is whether the EU in the coming confrontation with Russia can preserve its interests if challenged and exposed to nuclear escalation. In view of the strategic vulnerability of Europe, the answer is “no.”

Without NATO as the backbone, Europe would not be able to achieve its own goals. Even worse: Without its own nuclear deterrent, the EU would be at risk to be blackmailed apart when confronted with Russian nuclear escalation.

Russia is also moving tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, posing a direct nuclear threat for Poland from non-Russian territory.

The transfer of nuclear weapons to Belarus comes with a new military doctrine providing for the use of nuclear weapons. The entire European project would be at stake without being able to protect its own interests.

It is a matter of German national interest – as well as a matter of survival for Europe – to deter the threat of a use of nuclear weapons through strengthening European conventional as well as nuclear capabilities.

Germany must use its industrial base as well as its economic and financial resources to enable a European nuclear deterrence capability.

The way forward

The way to achieve this goal would be to renew Franco-German initiatives enlarging the national mission of the French nuclear potential.

French nuclear strategy has evolved substantially over time since Charles de Gaulle defined French nuclear strategy as a strictly national strategy. In 1995, French Prime Minister Alain Juppe offered to discuss a “concerted nuclear deterrence” with its European partners.

President Sarkozy also suggested a European nuclear dimension for French nuclear weapons. The most recent proposal for a European nuclear arms dialogue came from President Macron suggesting building a common European strategic culture.

It was German caution and reservation on all things nuclear that prevented any progress at the European level.

Building on the Lancaster Agreements

Today, France and Germany should engage in a new initiative to add a European dimension to the Franco-British Lancaster Agreements of November 2010. Once set in motion, the initiative should take on a multinational format that would include key European countries most interested in developing a European nuclear deterrence capability.

Italy, Spain, Poland as well as the Nordic countries Sweden and Finland would most likely join France, Britain and Germany in moving a nuclear European project forward.

The Lancaster Agreements would form an ideal basis for a credible European nuclear deterrence strategy. Despite Brexit, Britain still has strong interests in the security of continental Europe. Its firm military support for Ukraine in its fight for independence and survival as a nation is proof of this interest.

Hand in hand with NATO

It must be made clear from the beginning that the creation of a European nuclear deterrence capability does not undermine NATO. The credibility of a European deterrent system would suffer if transatlantic ties were weakened.

It is not only the Russian nuclear threat that puts the survival of the EU at risk. Regarding EU-China relations, the huge discrepancy in military capabilities between Europe and China puts the EU into an inferior geopolitical position.

Most recently, China increased its nuclear potential dramatically and, by 2035, would be on a similar level of nuclear forces as the United States and Russia.

International arms control

The New START Treaty will expire in 2026. Russia has already suspended the treaty. More importantly, China sees its nuclear potential not only as a defensive shield, but also as a potential sword. Ultimately economic relations and trade with China, if not based on an equal footing, will lead to weakening EU negotiating positions.

North Korean intercontinental nuclear missiles could also involve Europe. Attempts to threaten South Korea could drag the United States into such a conflict. Europe would have to stand on the U.S. side, potentially also being exposed to North Korean threats.

Iranian nuclear ambitions could curtail any significant role for Europe in the Middle East. The German commitment to stand with Israel as a matter of Staatsraeson, if unaddressed militarily, could turn out to be an empty promise.

A military capability of the EU to act beyond its borders would help to secure European economic interests, in particular crucial European energy supplies.

Conclusion

The project of building a European nuclear deterrent is an extremely complex undertaking. But the EU has instruments to engage in a nuclear program.

Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), as stipulated in the European Union’s Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), is a flexible instrument which could provide the framework for a new nuclear initiative based on the Lancaster Agreements.

A nuclear project will also need to be accompanied by serious steps in the conventional realm. Current European armies with a predominantly national outlook need to be brought closer to a true European Army.

In theory the numbers of available military personnel are quite impressive. The combined military personnel of the EU stand at 1,9 Million. This is larger than the U.S. armed forces, but because of the lack of a common purpose and much inferior military equipment, EU forces lack the necessary deployment capability.

Today it would be difficult for Europe to prevail in a larger conventional military conflict. This is an additional reason why a nuclear deterrent is critically important.

There have been several initiatives to build a nuclear capability based on the French and British nuclear forces in the past. German caution and hesitancy are mostly to blame for the lack of progress in these efforts. Germany’s deep aversion to all things nuclear must change. Now is the time to act.

France launches new nuclear warhead production programme

France, in addition to starting to produce new nuclear warheads, has also resumed tritium production.

gagadget.com

France launches new nuclear warhead production programme

By: Mykhailo Stoliar | yesterday, 08:59

In addition to starting to produce new nuclear warheads, France has also resumed tritium production.

Here's What We Know

The country's Defence Minister has recently visited a nuclear power plant that will produce tritium for military use. The radioactive material will be produced at a French nuclear research and development facility.

This is needed to increase the number of nuclear warheads. However, today France already has nuclear weapons - 290 units, and it is planned to increase the number to 350.

Since 2016, France has been producing TNO (Tête nucléaire océanique) nuclear warheads used in M51 intercontinental missiles.

Flashback

Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen with a relative atomic weight of one proton and two neutrons. It is essential for the production of nuclear weapons, including hydrogen and neutron bombs.

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Something to consider:

French GDP - 2.958 trillion USD (2021)
Russian GDP - 1.779 trillion USD (2021)
EU GDP - $19.35 trillion (nominal) in 2024 or $26.64 trillion (PPP)
US GDP - 23.32 trillion USD (2021)

Housecarl · Mar 21, 2024

Posted for fair use......

Australia sends $4.6B AUD to bolster UK sub industry for SSN AUKUS as shipbuilders named - Breaking Defense

"We’re already making good progress on the design and development of the next generation submarine in the UK, where we have more than 1,000 people working on the SSN-AUKUS program and major infrastructure investment underway," BAE Systems CEO Charles Woodburn said.

breakingdefense.com

GLOBAL, NAVAL WARFARE

Australia sends $4.6B AUD to bolster UK sub industry for SSN AUKUS as shipbuilders named

"We’re already making good progress on the design and development of the next generation submarine in the UK, where we have more than 1,000 people working on the SSN-AUKUS program and major infrastructure investment underway," BAE Systems CEO Charles Woodburn said.

By COLIN CLARK on March 21, 2024 at 7:14 PM

SYDNEY — The plan for Australia to build its own nuclear-powered attack submarines with help from Britain and the United States got a major boost today as the Australian and UK defense ministers announced Canberra would contribute $4.6 billion AUD ($3 billion USD) to the UK to help build and design the boats nuclear reactors and design the subs.

At the same time, the AUKUS partners revealed the first main contractors to build the boats: British firm BAE Systems and Australia’s ASC Pty Ltd.

“This investment, alongside funding from the UK Ministry of Defence, will enable the Rolls-Royce Derby site to double in size, with a further 1,170 highly-skilled jobs created,” UK Defense Secretary Grant Shapps said in a statement put out ahead of a visit by him and Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles to the South Australian shipyard where the SSN AUKUS boats will be built.

Australia’s newly announced investment will flow over a decade and will help ensure Australian requirements are part of design half the world away. During the same time, the Australian government will also invest some $8 billion AUD ($5.3 billion USD) in major improvements to HMAS Stirling, the main sub base in Western Australia. It needs to be enlarged to cope with larger Virginia-class sub visits and must be secured to meet US and UK standards for protecting nuclear secrets and equipment.

On top of that, more than $2 billion AUD ($1.3 billion USD) will be spent over the next few years to build a new sub shipyard in Osborne, South Australia.

With that funding, plus the naming BAE and ASC as builders of the new subs, Marles said the AUKUS partners had taken “another major step in the delivery of AUKUS, the announcement of the commercial build arrangements for SSN-AUKUS at the Osborne naval shipyard in Adelaide demonstrates that this is moving apace.”

In addition to building the boats, ASC will maintain the SSN AUKUS fleet, as well as the three to five Virginia-class attack subs that Australia is expected to buy from the US.

Australia will buy the Virginia class in the early 2030s before jointly building and operating SSN AUKUS with Britain about 10 years later.

Still, BAE Systems CEO Charles Woodburn said in a statement that work on SSN AUKUS has begun in the UK. “We’re already making good progress on the design and development of the next generation submarine in the UK where we have more than 1,000 people working on the SSN-AUKUS program and major infrastructure investment underway,” he said.

As always with politically sensitive defense projects, the jobs they generate are a major selling point, as the president of Rolls Royce Submarines noted. “These jobs are part of the 7,000 additional British jobs that the UK’s and Australia’s AUKUS submarine program will generate through their life,” he said. “At the peak, there will be over 21,000 people working on the SSN-AUKUS programs in the UK – concentrated in Barrow-in-Furness and Derby.”

In a trilateral statement, the AUKUS partners said that the “formation of these strategic partnerships with industry is a significant milestone in the AUKUS endeavor. It is a demonstration of our trilateral industry supporting the Optimal Pathway becoming a reality and will underpin Australia’s role as a capable security partner and responsible steward of a conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarine capability for decades to come.”

Housecarl · Mar 21, 2024

Posted for fair use.....

The Sentinel ICBM remains affordable – because context matters - Breaking Defense

Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin argue in this op-ed that added context is needed before deciding that the Sentinel ICBM is too expensive.

breakingdefense.com

AIR WARFARE, LAND WARFARE

The Sentinel ICBM remains affordable – because context matters

Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin argue in this op-ed that added context is needed before deciding that the Sentinel ICBM is too expensive.

By ADAM LOWTHER and CURTIS MCGIFFIN on March 20, 2024 at 1:20 PM

The cost of nuclear weapons is always a delicate topic in Washington, so it’s no surprise that news of cost overruns on America’s next-generation ICBM set off a wave of criticism for the program. In this new op-ed, Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin of the National Institute for Deterrence Studies argue that added context is needed for critics of the program.

In the six weeks since Breaking Defense and other publications initially covered the news that a Nunn-McCurdy breach in the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program is imminent, nuclear disarmament advocates saw an opportunity to once again argue that a land based ICBM is simply too expensive. Members of Congress also joined the fray.

The challenge, however, is that the current criticism lacks any real context for how long-term and large-scale weapons programs are cost estimated and acquired. It’s important to have this level of detail when looking at the complex, and admittedly costly, case for nuclear weapon investment.

First, start with how modern weapon system procurement is governed by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), a complex set of laws that, among other things, establishes the process to acquire a new ICBM. Because the Department of Defense no longer replaces major weapon systems on a regular ten-year expected life cycle, the average acquisition program is larger, lasts longer, and has much higher stakes. This is true across many platforms, whether they be aircraft, ships, tanks or other weapon systems.

The Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile is a case in point. When it went on alert in 1970, plans were already in the works for its replacement. Ultimately called the Peacekeeper ICBM, development began in 1971 with first deployment in 1986. When the Cold War ended, the production of Peacekeeper was canceled. This left the nation with a force of only 50 Peacekeepers. This newest ICBM was retired in 2002, leaving the much older and less capable Minuteman III as the nation’s only ICBM.

In short, the United States kept its oldest intercontinental ballistic missiles in the field and took a three-decade-long holiday from building new ones. This robbed industry of a generation of engineers, scientists, and program managers with experience building ICBMs and their supporting infrastructure. It also ensured that no Air Force acquisition officer had any experience with ICBMs.

As a result, neither the Air Force nor industry could draw on the experience of their workforce for lessons learned, best practices, or the fingerspitzengefuhl (fingertip feel) that leads to success. As Air Force acquisition personnel worked to develop effective cost estimates for the Sentinel program, they were attempting to project years and decades into the future with incomplete information and a lack of experience with the types of issues that are now making the program more expensive.

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It is important to keep in mind that cost increases are not for components of the program that are already under contract. They are for future program elements that are increasing in cost due to inflation (20 percent from 2020–2023), supply-chain challenges, workforce issues and unexpected infrastructure challenges. The challenges mentioned in the previous paragraph, combined with a missile complex infrastructure built in the 1960s, present significant hurdles to overcome. The second- and third-order effects caused by COVID-19 are examples of what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called “known unknowns and unknown unknowns.”

Any expectation that the Air Force could accurately estimate the cost of a program that would last six decades (2015–2075) is absurd. Inflation alone is unpredictable enough to make such an estimate little more than an educated guess.

This begs two questions. First, are cost increases in federal programs unusual? Second, do they matter?

Comparing Cost Growth

It is important to remember that when it comes to cost growth overruns, the Department of Defense and its contractors do a far better job of effectively projecting costs and avoiding impropriety than other agencies of the federal government. A few examples are instructive.

Chris Edwards and Nicole Kaeding examined cost overruns almost a decade ago and wrote:

In recent years, many federal projects have had large cost overruns. The cost to create the Healthcare.gov website launched in 2013 grew from $464 million to $824 million. The International Space Station more than quadrupled in cost from $17 billion to $74 billion. And a Veterans Affairs hospital currently being constructed in Orlando has more than doubled in cost from $254 million to $616 million.

The problem has not gotten better anywhere in government in the years since Edwards and Kaeding penned these words.

The federal official in charge of the Coronavirus Relief Fund estimates that $400 billion of the fund’s $900 billion were lost to fraudulent payments, much of it to foreign entities. Such blatant fraud is enough to cover the entire Sentinel and B-21 Raider bomber programs.

Similarly, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency responsible for these programs, estimates that waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid cost taxpayers $50–$70 billion annually. This is the entire nuclear operations, maintenance and modernization budget. Americans can afford Medicare and Medicaid fraud, but they cannot afford nuclear modernization?

Advocates of nuclear disarmament should stop using the cost of nuclear weapon modernization to vilify weapons of peace and stability. To claim they are unaffordable and that an increase in their cost makes them particularly unaffordable is misleading and ignorant of acquisition laws.

In 2023, nuclear operations, maintenance and modernization accounted for 0.009 percent of the federal budget. At the height of modernization, the Department of Defense will spend an estimated 7 percent of its budget to operate and maintain the existing arsenal, while also building a new one; a bargain for great-war avoidance.

The American people see the threat posed by Russia, China and North Korea, which is why a majority support nuclear modernization. Cost concerns are not a reason to give up the protection from conventional war that nuclear weapons provide.

Adam Lowther, PhD is Vice President for Research at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies (NIDS). Col (Ret.) Curtis McGiffin is Vice President for Research at NIDS. Together they have more than four decades of experience in the nuclear enterprise.

Housecarl · Mar 21, 2024

Posted for fair use.......

US Navy making Aegis updates, training changes based on Houthi attacks

The U.S. Navy and Lockheed Martin have developed and fielded software updates for destroyers shooting down Houthi missiles and drones in the Red Sea.

www.defensenews.com

US Navy making Aegis updates, training changes based on Houthi attacks

By Megan Eckstein
Mar 21, 11:07 AM

The U.S. Navy and Lockheed Martin have developed and fielded software updates for destroyers shooting down Houthi missiles and drones in the Red Sea, thanks to a team of technical experts that mined data from all the shootdown events since October.

The team studied engagements between U.S. ships and aircraft in the Middle East as well as threats posed by the Yemen-based militant group to understand how the fleet could tweak operations to better see and defeat drones and missiles. It also considered new capabilities the fleet might need for self-defense and to protect merchant ships.

The Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center has led this effort. The center’s mission is to develop surface warfare tactics, incorporate those into advanced training events and provide tactical expertise for the fleet.

The center’s commander, Rear Adm. Wilson Marks, told Defense News that after the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer Carney’s Oct. 19 shootdown of three land-attack cruise missiles launched from Yemen, “we did stand up a 24/7 watch to ensure that we could provide support to the ships and staff at a moment’s notice as they needed.”

As engagements lessened, the Navy has moved into a steady-state rhythm, with weekly meetings involving SMWDC, ships’ crew members, strike group leaders, U.S. 5th Fleet leaders and more.

The ships and aircraft provide a “storyboard” of what happened in each engagement from their perspective, Marks said, as well as data collected by the radars, sensors and combat systems.

SMWDC’s technical experts in Dahlgren, Virginia, then work with a team that includes Program Executive Office Integrated Weapons Systems, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center Corona Division, Naval Information Warfighting Development Center, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Lockheed Martin — and they scour the data for a range of purposes.

“The first thing is we provide immediate feedback to the ships,” highlighting any tactics changes SMWDC recommends, anything new they’re seeing in adversary behavior, new ways to configure ship systems to better see and respond to the threat, or other urgent lessons.

“Basically we’re trying to pull away the fog of war that’s going on there,” Marks said.

In parallel, PEO Integrated Weapons Systems and Lockheed Martin are looking for “potential technical fixes” that can go into Aegis Combat System updates.

Additionally, SMWDC not only provides briefings about lessons learned to the next ships preparing to deploy, but it also rolls these updated tactics and real-world scenarios into the Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training events that ships conduct before their final certifications and deployments.

The Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, for example, went through a Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training event that was heavily influenced by the types of engagements destroyers have seen in the Red Sea over the past six months.

The strike group also tested tweaks to the Aegis Combat System software before it was pushed to ships currently operating in the Middle East, Marks said. He would not discuss the nature of the software changes, citing security reasons, but said it has shown “a significant increase in capability.”

Marks said the Navy and Lockheed Martin had developed a so-called Aegis Speed to Capability process that allows for small changes to be rapidly fielded, instead of waiting to incorporate them into the next major baseline upgrade to the combat system software.

The rear admiral said this has proved its value, as some ships deployed to the region now have software updates that help counter drones, “and we’re finding those to be very successful. And so that was an investment that was made several years ago that is really paying off now.”

Broadly, Marks said, Houthi engagements since October show the “tactics, techniques and procedures that we have in place are solid. Any changes that need to be made to those are kind of in the margins, and basically just making sure people fully understand how to utilize them.”

Though he wouldn’t provide specifics, again citing security reasons, Marks said some lessons learned have to do with the basics, including how the crews set up and operate their SPY radar.

“The Red Sea is probably one of the most difficult areas of the world when it comes to atmospherics and issues with radars. So our continued emphasis on how you set up your radar system in that type of environment has really been critical,” he said. “The second is, because of those atmospheric conditions, and also based on the adversary they’re going against, we make sure that we tailor our systems to look for the capabilities that the adversary has.”

Rather than look for a missile or drone akin to what China and Russia might fire, “you would look at the current adversary and say: ‘Hey, maybe we need to focus in a little bit more on ... certain speed characteristics or things like that that they’re seeing over in the Red Sea.’”

He noted SMWDC made a decision within the past couple years to add training on countering unmanned systems in all domains, which has been validated by Houthis operating unmanned systems in the air, on the surface and under the water.

Overall, he said, the Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training events and other drills don’t require major changes or additions; rather, they may be tweaked to add a little more emphasis on certain skills and types of engagements to best prepare deploying ships for what they could encounter in the Middle East.

Though SMWDC and the rest of the technical team have generated a number of lessons and changes since October, Marks said it is important to note “our captains and crews in the Red Sea have been doing an absolutely incredible job.”

“Those sailors are executing at the top of their game — and this is during sustained combat operations at sea — and they’ve been adapting to all the adversary’s tactics like true combat veterans,” he added.

About Megan Eckstein
Megan Eckstein is the naval warfare reporter at Defense News. She has covered military news since 2009, with a focus on U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations, acquisition programs and budgets. She has reported from four geographic fleets and is happiest when she’s filing stories from a ship. Megan is a University of Maryland alumna.

Housecarl · Mar 22, 2024

Posted for fair use......

Mexico's president says he won't fight drug cartels on US orders, calls it a 'Mexico First' policy

Mexico’s president said Friday he won’t fight Mexican drug cartels on U.S. orders, in the clearest explanation yet of his refusal to confront the gangs. Over the years, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has laid out various justifications for his “hugs, not bullets” policy of avoiding...

news.yahoo.com

Mexico's president says he won't fight drug cartels on US orders, calls it a 'Mexico First' policy

MARK STEVENSON
Updated Fri, March 22, 2024 at 2:14 PM PDT·5 min read
2.6k Comments

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s president said Friday he won’t fight Mexican drug cartels on U.S. orders, in the clearest explanation yet of his refusal to confront the gangs.

Over the years, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has laid out various justifications for his “hugs, not bullets” policy of avoiding clashes with the cartels. In the past he has said “you cannot fight violence with violence,” and on other occasions he has argued the government has to address “the causes” of drug cartel violence, ascribing them to poverty or a lack of opportunities.

But on Friday, while discussing his refusal to go after the cartels, he made it clear he viewed it as part of what he called a “Mexico First” policy.

“We are not going to act as policemen for any foreign government,” López Obrador said at his daily news briefing. “Mexico First. Our home comes first.”

López Obrador basically argued that drugs were a U.S. problem, not a Mexican one. He offered to help limit the flow of drugs into the United States, but only, he said, on humanitarian grounds.

“Of course we are going to cooperate in fighting drugs, above all because it has become a very sensitive, very sad humanitarian issue, because a lot of young people are dying in the United States because of fentanyl,” the president said. Over 70,000 Americans die annually because of synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which are mainly made in Mexico from precursor chemicals smuggled in from China.

López Obrador's view — like many of his policies — harkens back to the 1970s, a period when many officials believed that Mexican cartels selling drugs to gringos was a U.S. issue, not a Mexican one.

“For decades, past administrations in Mexico have thought the war against drug cartels was basically a U.S. problem,” said security analyst David Saucedo, noting that Mexican domestic drug consumption, while growing — especially methamphetamines — is still at relatively low levels.

“On the other hand, the drug cartels provide jobs in regions where the Mexican government can't provide economic development, they encourage social mobility, and generate revenue through drug sales to balance trade and investment deficits.”

López Obrador has argued before against “demonizing” the drug cartels, and has encouraged leaders of the Catholic church to try to negotiate peace pacts between warring gangs.

Explaining why he has ordered the army not to attack cartel gunmen, López Obrador said in 2022 “we also take care of the lives of the gang members, they are human beings.”

He has also sometimes appeared not to take the violence issue seriously. In June 2023, he said of one drug gang that had abducted 14 police officers: “I'm going to tell on you to your fathers and grandfathers,” suggesting they should get a good spanking.

Asked about those comments at the time, residents of one town in the western Mexico state of Michoacan who have lived under drug cartel control for years reacted with disgust and disbelief.

“He is making fun of us,” said one restaurant owner, who asked to remain anonymous because he — like almost everyone else in town — has long been forced to pay protection money to the local cartel.

“The president said out loud what we had suspected for a long time, that his administration is not really fighting the drug cartels,” said Saucedo, the security analyst. “He has only decided to administer the conflict, setting up what may have to be a crusade against the cartels in the future that he won’t have to fight.”

López Obrador has also made a point of visiting the township of Badiraguato in Sinaloa state, the home of drug lords like Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, at least a half dozen times, and pledging to do so again before he leaves office in September.

It's also a stance related to prickly nationalism and independence. Asked in November why he has visited the sparsely populated rural township so many times, López Obrador quoted a line from an old drinking song, “because I want to.”

The president has imposed strict limits on U.S. agents operating in Mexico, and limited how much contact Mexican law enforcement can have with them.

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico had no comment on López Obrador's most recent remarks. But it did note the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions Friday on a Sinaloa Cartel money-laundering network in which the proceeds of fentanyl sales were used to buy shipments of cell phones in the United States, which were then sold in Mexico.

John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, credited “strong partnership with the government of Mexico, with which we coordinated closely and for which, we are grateful,” in investigating that case.

While Mexico has detained a few high-profile gang members, the government's policy no longer matches what Mexican drug cartels have become: extortion machines that make much of their money, not from trafficking drugs, but extorting protection payments from businessmen, farmers, shop owners and street vendors, killing anyone who doesn't pay.

They take over legitimate businesses, kill rival street-level drug dealers, and murder bus and taxi drivers who refuse to act as lookouts for them.

The cartels control increasingly large swathes of territory both in northern Mexico — their traditional base — and in southern states like Guerrero, Michoacan, Chiapas and Veracruz.

It is unclear if peaceful coexistence was ever possible with Mexican drug gangs. While some regions have produced marijuana or opium poppies for at least 50 years, the illegal trade always brought violence.

López Obrador claims the “Mexico First” policy is needed to reduce domestic violence. Last year, he claimed Mexico saw a drop of 17% in homicides under his administration. But in fact homicides had already fallen about 7% from their mid-2018 peak when López Obrador took office in December of that year. The president is essentially taking credit for a drop that started under his predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto.

The most reliable annual count shows that homicides in Mexico declined by 9.7% in 2022 compared to 2021, the first significant drop during the current administration. Mexico’s National Statistics Institute said there were 32,223 killings in 2022.

The country’s homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants dropped from about 28 in 2021 to 25 in 2022. By comparison, the U.S. homicide rate in 2021 was about 7.8 per 100,000 inhabitants.

Housecarl · Mar 22, 2024

Posted for fair use.....

Japan set to lift export restrictions on F-X fighter jet

Companies involved in the program have also expressed intentions to export the jets to other countries to defray development and production costs.

news.yahoo.com

Japan set to lift export restrictions on F-X fighter jet

Leilani Chavez
Mon, March 18, 2024 at 7:29 AM PDT·2 min read

MANILA, Philippines — The Japanese government is taking steps to allow the export of a stealth fighter jet currently under development with the United Kingdom and Italy.

The move comes amid a shift in Japan’s security strategy and as the country loosens stringent post-war export regulations targeting weaponry. Under revised rules, Japan had approved the transfer of radars to the Philippines and the delivery of Patriot missiles to the U.S. last year.

In December, Japan, the U.K. and Italy launched a joint partnership to develop the Mitsubishi F-X fighter jet under the Global Combat Air Program, which aims to make new stealth fighter jets by 2035 to replace the Japan Air Self-Defense Force’s aging F-2s as well as Britain’s and Italy’s Eurofighter Typhoons.

Easing export rules on the F-X fighter jet marks the latest revision in Japan’s materiel transfer rules since it revamped its security policy in December 2022. The move faced dissent from opposition parties and Komeito, the junior coalition partner of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told the Diet — Japan’s parliament — on Wednesday that restricting exports to countries outside the partnership will hinder the country’s aircraft modernization plan and dampen the success of the international joint development program.

Easing the restrictions on the jets will create a “favorable security environment” for Japan, Kishida said, adding that the program will boost the local defense industry.

Companies involved in the program have also expressed intentions to export the jets to other countries to defray development and production costs.

After months of negotiations, Komeito softened its stance and on Friday agreed to the change with stringent conditions, specifically that the revision will only cover the F-X fighter jet, the parties said in a joint news conference.

Furthermore, all fighter jet exports will require Cabinet approval, and access will only be open to countries with existing defense deals with Japan. The parties also clarified barring sales to countries under existing armed conflict.

Japan’s Cabinet is expected to approve the revisions later this month, in time for partners to release the initial designs of the F-X jet.

Meanwhile, major opposition groups remain critical of the alteration, indicating that relaxing export rules on the fighter jet counters Japan’s pacifist position and raises alarm about the country transitioning into an arms merchant.

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The Sentinel ICBM remains affordable – because context matters​

Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin argue in this op-ed that added context is needed before deciding that the Sentinel ICBM is too expensive.​

Rapidly evolving threats demand 21st Century Security solutions​

Comparing Cost Growth​

On TB every waking moment

US Navy making Aegis updates, training changes based on Houthi attacks​

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Mexico's president says he won't fight drug cartels on US orders, calls it a 'Mexico First' policy​

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Japan set to lift export restrictions on F-X fighter jet​

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(336) 02-24-2024-to-03-01-2024__THEWINDSofWAR

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(338) 03-09-2024-to-03-15-2024__THEWINDSofWAR

From Khrushchev to Putin, Russian’s Reflexive Control theory has alarmed NATO

[News analysis] Putin may be claiming N. Korea has its “own nuclear umbrella” to gain leverage in relations with S. Korea

Related stories

Macron to Putin: "It is inappropriate to threaten when we have nuclear weapons"

Germany debates nuclear weapons, again. But now it’s different.

Agni-5 is a counter to China’s nuclear expansion, but India can’t stop at MIRVing

MIRVing permits a single missile to carry several warheads that can be aimed at multiple targets several hundred kilometres apart. It comes with pros and cons.

Pros and cons of MIRVing

US racing to deploy sub-launched hypersonic missiles

TOP TRENDING STORIES

Unprecedented U.S. Hypersonic Weapons Test From Guam Has Occurred

North Korea is behind cyberattacks worth $US3 billion and is stealing cryptocurrency to fund weapons programs, UN report finds

How North Korea makes a fortune stealing crypto

What tactics are being used?

Has Iran Become a De Facto Nuclear State?

Beating Putin’s Game of Nuclear Chicken

About the Author(s)

Douglas London

Germany and a European Nuclear Deterrence Capability

The new nuclear landscape

The Russia dimension

Vladimir Putin’s world view

The nuclear balance sheet

The neglected need for deterrence

The way forward

Building on the Lancaster Agreements

Hand in hand with NATO

International arms control

Conclusion

More on this topic

France launches new nuclear warhead production programme

Here's What We Know

Flashback

Australia sends $4.6B AUD to bolster UK sub industry for SSN AUKUS as shipbuilders named

"We’re already making good progress on the design and development of the next generation submarine in the UK, where we have more than 1,000 people working on the SSN-AUKUS program and major infrastructure investment underway," BAE Systems CEO Charles Woodburn said.

The Sentinel ICBM remains affordable – because context matters

Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin argue in this op-ed that added context is needed before deciding that the Sentinel ICBM is too expensive.

Rapidly evolving threats demand 21st Century Security solutions

Comparing Cost Growth

US Navy making Aegis updates, training changes based on Houthi attacks

Mexico's president says he won't fight drug cartels on US orders, calls it a 'Mexico First' policy

Japan set to lift export restrictions on F-X fighter jet